Next stop, Hamburg, Germany

Sadly, after 19 nights, it was time to leave the cruise ship this morning. We will miss our favourite waiter Krisna, who looked after us from morning to dusk. These guys work incredibly hard - 11-hour days without a day off for their entire 8-month contract. We have had a ton of fun, visited many interesting places and made loads of memories but time for the next stage of our journey. Disembarkation was an easy process and we were at the train station in Warnemunde by 9.00am. We jumped on the train to Rostock in the hope of catching our train to Hamburg at 11.08am but unfortunately it had been delayed by a couple of hours and wasn't leaving until 1.08pm so it was quite a long wait at the train station. It was all a little confusing trying to work out what was going on because most of the staff at the train station spoke very little English but we did meet a couple of fellow passengers from the cruise ship who were able to help us. The train journey to Hamburg was pretty much non-eventful but we sat next to a young German lumberjack who spoke excellent English and had some great stories to tell of his recent travels. After checking into our hotel (only a 5-minute walk from Hamburg Central Train Station) we had a bit of a rest before embarking on a walk around the city, specifically the Speicherstadt area, a huge warehouse district for which construction was started in 1883. This area is also a UNESCO heritage site. Hamburg is a city of numerous canals and bridges (apparently there are over 2500 bridges) and the city reminded us a bit of Venice with all its canals and waterways. Regrettably for us, on our walk we ended up on the wrong side of town in an area where we didn't feel safe (by now it was about 8.00pm on a Sunday evening). I won't go into too much detail but we (me in particular) felt very unsafe, frightened and very vulnerable. And so concluded our evening walk around Hamburg City. We grabbed a bite to eat and headed back to the safe confines of our hotel.Read more